


eyes that know me

by tusktooth



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Fantasy High Sophomore Year Spoilers (Dimension 20), falling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24991774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tusktooth/pseuds/tusktooth
Summary: The first time Fig remembers falling, Gilear is there to catch her.
Relationships: Ayda Aguefort/Figueroth Faeth, Figueroth Faeth & Gilear Faeth
Comments: 6
Kudos: 75





	eyes that know me

**Author's Note:**

> im like halfway through the finale the way this show is making me fully spiral  
> [find me on tumblr](http://adaine.tumblr.com/)

The first time Fig remembers falling, Gilear is there to catch her. She must have fallen before because there are scrapes on her elbows and cuts on her knees but she doesn’t quite remember any of it. She’s trying to ride her bike without the training wheels and she gets frustrated. She’s always been the type of kid that loves to try new things but moves on quickly when it’s not easier.

She doesn’t want to ride a bike if she’s going to get hurt.  _ If I fall and get hurt, I’ll give up, _ she mentally decides and, but a moment later, she loses control of the wheel and starts to slip. She closes her eyes tightly as if that will somehow lessen the impact.

But then there are a pair of hands on her back, pulling her upright before she can make contact with the ground.

“Are you alright, my sweet daughter?” he asks her.

She dares to open her eyes and, once she catches sight of his comforting blue eyes, she’s able to relax and nods. “Thank you, Dad. Thanks for catching me.”

He smiles. “I’ll always be there for you, Figueroth. I won’t let you fall.”

“I love you, Dad,” she says with a smile because she’s young enough to believe his words, to think he’d never leave her, no matter who she was.

As she gets older, she finds herself surrounded by people who catch her. She has her mom and her dad and everything seems great on that front, as least as far as she can see. She’s on the cheer team too, as a flyer. Her squad throws her up in the air and the catch her almost all of the time. Even when they miss, somebody is able to break her fall in a way that doesn’t hurt either of them.

And then her horns start coming in. At first, it’s just a couple of bumps on her head. Maybe she got hurt during practice without noticing it. But her mom takes her to the doctor and she finds out that it’s not just a couple of bumps and her dad isn’t her fucking dad.

They break through her skin and she bleeds and it hurts like the Nine Hells she came from and when she needs someone to catch her, to help her through the pain, she finds herself utterly alone.

Sandra Lynn and Gilear won’t stop fighting. In a matter of weeks, her dad has moved across town and the divorce papers are sitting on the table with two violent signatures, waiting to be sent off to the court.

Her friends don’t catch her either. It’s not necessarily because she’s a tiefling, though that is definitely a factor with some of the more bigoted girls. It’s that she’s too much to deal with. Everything in her life is falling apart and the people she was closest to abandon her because she’s too whiney and she’s kind of weird now.

She gets into trouble in school because everything is horrible and she just wants someone to fucking  _ look  _ at her. It’s mostly small offenses but every time it gets bigger and bigger, in the hope of actually drawing some attention.

When she gets caught spray-painting what she thinks is a very tasteful vagina on the side of the school (though the principal happens to see it differently), she gets suspended for a week and Gilear is called to pick her up because Sandra Lynn is off in the forest.

He doesn’t say a word as he walks out of the principal’s office and ushers her toward the car before starting toward her mother’s home.

“Are you mad?” she asks him as they drive.

His expression is stony but his chin twitches. “I feel that I don’t have the authority over you to be upset. Your mother can deal with it.”

“She won’t,” Fig replies, crossing her arms and slumping down into the passenger’s seat. “She’ll yell at me and go back to work. That’s all she ever does.”

“It’s really none of my concern,” he tells her as they pull up to the house. “You’re no longer a Faeth.”

And this stings more than anything else has before. Because “no longer” implies that she was a Faeth before. It means that this was  _ her  _ fault. Gilear had seen something in her that she didn’t like and cast her away because of it. It’s as if he saw her teetering on the edge and decides to give her that one last push she needs to fall further than ever before.

So she falls. She fucking falls and refuses to look up to see how far away the top had been.

She picks up the bass and plays loud enough to keep Sandra Lynn up when she’s trying to sleep. She cuts off her old friends entirely because they obviously didn’t give a shit about the person she was becoming so why the hell should she keep them around? Gilear reaches out and apologizes and tries to be her fucking dad again but she pushes back, those five words etched into the back of her mind. Burn, burn, burn it all. Everything that hurt her reduced to nothing but a pile of ashes as she turns her fall into a fucking cliff dive.

When the summer ends, she starts at Aguefort, the school that Sandra Lynn had attended when she was younger. Fig (just Fig now) fully intends on stirring up as much shit as she can. She’s only here and not starting her band because she doesn’t have a choice, so she’s perfectly content to piss off the Vice Principal and skip out on class and steal ghost steak from the teacher’s lounge, all while smoking and drinking, of course.

And then she gets detention and meets the Bad Kids. They fight this corn monster and Adaine beats Fig’s former mentor-turned-evil with a spoon which  _ sucks _ but also is kind of metal. She ends up getting along really well with the Bad Kids and thinks they’re really cool, in a chaotic sort of way.

They’re falling too, each in their own ways, but they’re still willing to stick out an arm to catch one another. And, maybe this is fucked up to say, but Adaine’s situation, where her family treats her terribly without any apology, helps her to put her relationship with Gilear into perspective. Because he’s trying so hard and, even if he’s not her dad, he still raised her. He was still there to catch her that first time.

Then she meets Gorthalax, her real dad, and he’s fucking awesome. He didn’t leave her on purpose. He had been trapped all along, dying to meet her! His domain includes the Bottomless Pit which she finds kind of ironic, seeing as it’s a place that people go to fall.

Fig knows her friends would probably catch her if she fell, but she starts to play a part, a fictionalized version of herself that people might find more palatable so she doesn’t get rejected again. She disguises herself as an older woman and kisses Dr. Asha which she  _ knows _ is fucked up. But it makes her feel like someone can love her, even if the person they think they love isn’t really her.

She writes her music and performs it, Gorgug backing her up on the drums. She’s fallen before but now she’s starting to get back up and show the world that she can stand back up on her scraped up knees and refuse to let her past hurt her anymore.

Of course, when she thinks she finally is starting to get some sort of control over her fucked up life again, it all goes to shit. She loses control of herself and captures Gorthalax in a cursed gem that she can’t get him out of and she almost kills Riz in some sort of fucking sacrificial ritual.

Adaine saves her because she has friends here that will catch her but Gilear dies in the process and, while Kristen brings him back, it doesn’t really make it any better. She hurts people, again and again. How long until they would all get sick of her? Until she’d lose Gilear and all her friends once again?

She begs Gilear to leave her, to go home and be safe, but he refuses. It’s both touching and heartbreaking that, after everything, he’s willing to stay with her now. Because she loves him and, well, he’s still her dad even if it’s not biological. But, at the same time, he was just going to keep getting hurt and she didn’t want that for him. She had already lost one dad, losing another would be devastating.

They continue on and, by some miracle, her friends still trust her. They shouldn’t. Even if she was being controlled, who was to say that it couldn’t happen again? If she were to fall again, she didn’t want to take them all down with her.

She doesn’t leave. Maybe it’s selfish of her to continue to put the people she loves the most in harm’s way but she stays. There is some good she can do here, even if there’s also plenty of bad.

In the pirate city of Leviathan, Fig meets Ayda Aguefort and she’s probably the coolest person that she’s ever met. She’s smart and beautiful and really everything about her is fucking awesome. She’s Adaine’s friend first but then she becomes Fig’s friend by association.

And then they become something more. They share kisses and Ayda gives her a feather and she leaves, but only so that she can preserve her legacy in Leviathan and research the spell that they need to save Gorthalax. With Ayda, she can be Fig Faeth, not some stranger she made up on the fly. It amazes her that someone as great as she is could have feelings for someone so fucked up but she does nonetheless.

When they go to Hell, Fig takes her place as the new archdevil of the Bottomless Pit, which is kind of hilarious in a fucked up sort of way. All of these falling souls and she gets to watch them, firmly planted on her own two feet.

Things get insane when Fabian’s dad comes to help break Riz’s dad out of Hell and the others show up to help. She finds out later that they did it because Ayda thought Fig might be in trouble. She had literally traveled to  _ Hell _ so that she could make sure Fig was okay. Nobody has ever worried about her this much.

They become girlfriends for real and Fig asks her to stay. Ayda said nobody has ever asked her before and Fig has certainly never asked but this is different. She was different.

After all, did falling really mean anything when her girlfriend had wings?

But then she loses her in the nightmare forest, her image flickering away, and Fig can’t help but feel this is her fault. She asked her to stay and now she was fucking gone. Her mom, Tracker, and Ragh are gone too. She’s the one that brought them all into the forest. A whispering in her ear taunts her. She lost them all, just like she loses everyone and it’s all her fault. The sickest part is that she knows these whispers are her own, borne of her own insecurities.

In the Forest of the Nightmare King, she has a dream and Gorthalax is there. He tells her about rebellion, about how she can be a devil in that way rather than in the form of taking on the virtues that she hates. She can forge her own destiny. She can catch herself.

Still, she has her doubts as she gets marched around the Forest attached by a couple of threads and is reminded of the personas she so often puts forth. But then she sees Ayda, sees into her mind, and is reminded that the Fig she loves really is the true Fig. Someone knows her and has her back if she ever does lose her grip again.

It helps her pull her self back up out of the pit of self-doubt she so often found herself tripping back into. Ayda so often finds herself falling in the same spaces and they’ll always be there to pull each other out, no matter what.

And then there, amongst the celestials in the Forest of the Nightmare king, she finds herself staring across the way at Riz helplessly, unable to cast or do anything really.

Gilear comes to save her, to grab her by the back before she can hit the ground once more, armed in the pride suit of armor, striking demons down where they walk.

There are so many demons and they overpower him, even with a magical item of immense strength, and he dies, crumpling to the ground, dead for the fourth time on their journey.

She crafts the diamond in her palm and dives toward him pressing it down into his chest and murmuring the words of the spell. As her fiery hands reach into his heart to pump it once more, she finds herself feeling vaguely content.

Because this time she’s there to catch her dad.


End file.
